began making their way past a string of tenant houses. In the first yard, black women were boiling wash, and in the second children were feeding dominique chickens, and on the porches of the third and fourth and fifth old men sat smoking pipes and watching them pass like some dream drifting before them, perhaps the only strange white people they’d ever seen, too rare even to believe much less call out to with a good word.
They found the rail embankment and rode down it to the small gingerbread station. He walked in and woke up the drowsing agent and bought tickets to a connecting station further south, not buying through fares so he would not leave a trail. He also bought northbound tickets for thirty miles up the line toward Indiana. The agent asked where the people were who would use the extra set, and he said that relatives were coming at this very moment to take the southbound.
Outside, he scanned the long ridges they’d crossed. He would buy new tickets in the first connection and the second as well, northbound and southbound at each, figuring the expense was worth it to make it that much harder for anybody to trail them, if trail them they would.
While Vessy and the girl sat on the long bench on the track side of the station, he walked around to where he’d tethered the horses to a sapling, the old hitching rail too rotten and wobbly to trust. Two Fords passed in the gravel road, and he stood in the sun with his boots gathering street dust until a white man passed on foot. He looked him over and decided he looked wary, and a wary white man would ask questions when somebody tried to give him two horses, even two sorry broken-down nags. Next came a black man wearing a creased and shiny face and riding a mule with no saddle on it, a very old man who wouldn’t question anyone’s motives, not in this town.
“Hold on!” Skadlock called.
The man pulled up his little mule, which seemed mostly donkey. “Cap’n?”
“You look like a man what needs a horse or two.”
The black man’s eyes were cloudy, and he got down and took off his hat, leaning in to try and recognize who’d flagged him down. “I wanted this’n to pull my buggy, but he won’t get between the shafts, no he won’t. My woman can’t come to town no more, so she send me everywhere she want.”
“You got any money?”
“Cap’n, I ain’t got a cent. Can’t get one, neither.”
“Well, I tell you what. We come down from Louisville on these two and they’ve give out. We got to take the train, so if you want ’em, just haul ’em off to your place and let me have two dollars.”
The old man walked over, trailing the reins of his mule behind, and ran a hand down the neck and along the saddle of the tall horse. He felt all four legs. He did the same with the little horse, which kicked out at him and almost knocked him down. “Tack go, too?”
“Tack, too.”
The black face froze in thought and Skadlock interpreted the hesitation as meaning nobody would believe that any foreign white man would sell him two mounts and tack for two dollars. He would be charged with stealing. “Reckon I better not, Cap’n. But I thank you.”
He tried not to show his rising anger and looked around at the town’s simple buildings. “What if I give you a bill of sale? I can’t leave these animals in the street.” From three miles away he could hear the whistle of the southbound train.
“I don’t know.”
“Look, damn it, if you had all the money in the world, what would you give for the pair?”
The man looked down. “Well, the big fella old as me and the little one only got three legs. Them saddles feel like oven toast. I guess maybe nine dollars.”
He went inside the station and got a sheet of paper and a pencil, making out a receipt from a Mr. Walter Lee Copes, Louisville, Kentucky, for nine dollars, then went back to the road and put it in the man’s hand. “If anybody asks you about them horses, show ’em that paper. My street address is on it and they can write me a letter.”
The man looked at the sheet closely, holding it upside down. “How I know this paper don’t say, ‘Hang this fella for a hoss thief’?” He smiled to show he was joking, but they both knew he wasn’t.
Skadlock set his jaw. “How far out in the country you live?”
The black man stepped back. “’Bout five mile.”
He reached into his coat pocket and peeled a five-dollar note off his wad. “You think even a fool would pay five dollars to play some joke? These animals is going to suffer if I leave ’ em here. This here’s a dollar a mile.”
The man folded the bill carefully and put it down in his shoe. “Okay, Cap’n. I can take these po’ boys off your hand.”
He slowly climbed onto the mule and received the reins of the horses. The mule turned around as of its own will, and the lame animals followed.
Skadlock watched for a while, furious at how he’d been out-smarted, then turned toward the tracks thinking about the train ride, which would involve two changes. He recalled that his brother would leave horses tied to the little station at Fault for the ten-mile trek back to their place. If he didn’t have Vessy helping, the girl would be screaming her head off the whole way.
But when he came around the corner of the station and sat on the bench, the child climbed up in his lap. He studied her warily, as though a possum had decided to perch on his right thigh and grab hold of his shirt pocket. The warm child-smell of her drifted up to him again, and he put a hand on her stomach as she leaned out to watch the locomotive smoke its way up to the station. She clapped her hands and leaned farther away when the engine bell rang, the air brakes hissed, and the cylinders bled bursts of steam. He put his other hand around the first and held firm, sharing with her this amazing sight.
Chapter Twenty-nine
GRAY DAWN. Mrs. Benton signaled for a tug to come out from the Baton Rouge levee. Sam could see commas of steam spring up against the bank, and a boat came out toward midriver with a coal flat on its hip. He climbed down and jumped aboard the tug, which cast off from its barge and chuffed back in. Crossing the levee, he came up behind the great redbrick expanse of the Y &MV station. An agent sold him a ticket on number 36 for Gashouse, where he could change for the mixed train into Woodgulch, putting him at the end of the line at 2:45.
He made the first connection with no idea of what he would do in Woodgulch, knowing only that it was ten miles from Zeneau, where he could begin tracking the boy. The one passenger car rocked at the end of a string of boxcars and three stinking chemical tankers. On a curve he saw the small locomotive, filthy with soot and forty years old, its mailbox whistle shrieking at a dirt road crossing. He sat next to a white-haired gentleman and asked him how he might get from Woodgulch to Zeneau.
He regarded Sam a long time before spitting over the window ledge. “Who are you, son?”
“Sam Simoneaux. I live in New Orleans.”
“New Orleans,” the man repeated, inching higher in his seat as if his seatmate were from New Delhi or some other foreign place replete with contagion and unspeakable ways. “What are you after in Zeneau?”
As Sam explained, an acne-scarred man in the seat ahead turned around. “This young’un you after, where’s he a-headed?”
“South along the river.”
The man snorted. “Ain’t nothing in there. Is he after black bear or something?”
“He’s kind of a runaway.”
The white-haired man also snorted. “His old man take a stick to him?”
“His daddy’s dead. I just want to catch him for his momma before he gets into trouble.”
“You say he’s fifteen year old?”
“That’s a fact.”
“You wouldn’t believe some of the crazy stuff I did when I was fifteen. One time on a dare I rode a bull and that devil carried me through a bob-war fence and a quarter-mile into town, where he and me went through a hardware-store window and took out a hundred dollars’ worth of sash work. I landed next to a Coats and Clark thread dispenser and the doc sewed me up with navy-blue number three right out the display box.”
